William Morris and The Green Dining Room

Magazine Antiques, August, 1996 by Linda Parry

In the year in which the centenary of the death of William Morris is commemorated by a major exhibition at the museum, attention is also drawn to the Green Dining Room (Pl. I), now known as the Morris Room, one of three areas commissioned by the museum authorities to replace the temporary facility. Information gleaned from designs, documents, letters, and account books provides a fascinating account of the public patronage and private endeavor that went into creating what is now recognized as one of the most historically significant and aesthetically interesting British public decorative schemes of the nineteenth century, recently defined as "the first interior that revealed the future direction of the Aesthetic as well as the Arts and Crafts movement."(2)

In 1860 Parliament approved a limited extension to the permanent buildings of the South Kensington Museum (as the Victoria and Albert was called until 1899). The drawings were not by an architect but by a soldier, Captain Francis Fowke (1823-1865) of the royal engineers, who was responsible for the construction of all new museum buildings on the South Kensington site and, amongst other notable later works, the 1862 International Exhibition building in London. Fowke's plans included a large lecture theater with three new refreshment rooms below to replace those in operation on the separate site. A kitchen to service these new areas was proposed between the museum and the adjoining school of art (later the Royal School of Art). In his earliest drawings it is clear that Fowke originally intended the refreshment rooms to look out over the garden but soon changed his mind, moving them to the north side of the new extension and leaving the garden outlook for the benefit of exhibition galleries.

By 1865 the new building was far enough advanced for Fowke and the museum's dynamic director, Sir Henry Cole (1808-1882), to consider the decoration of the three rooms. The artist Edward Poynter was appointed to decorate the east room, and for the large central apsidal room the museum chose Godfrey Sykes, Reuben Townroe, and James Gamble, three pupils of the artist Alfred Stevens. For the west room, which was the first to be completed, the museum authorities approached the newly established firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company.

Founded on April 11, 1861, following the success and enjoyment experienced in the communal decoration of Red House in Bexley Heath, Kent, Morris's first marital home, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company consisted of seven equal partners: Morris himself; two of his close friends since student days, the budding artist Edward Burne-Jones and the mathematician Charles Faulkner; the architect Philip Webb; the well-known artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown; and Peter Paul Marshall, a friend of Madox Brown's and a keen amateur painter who was a sanitary engineer by trade.

Why the museum should have chosen the Morris firm beyond exerting keen entrepreneurial skills in employing new young talent is difficult to determine. However, it is clear that the work of the firm was already known to the museum authorities, for in 1862 they had displayed their wares on two stands at the International Exhibition, in Fowke's metal and glass structure erected close to the museum in South Kensington. Subsequent recognition of the partners' precocious talents came in 1864 when the museum purchased their first examples of the firm's work.(3)

However, frequent social contact between the partners and the staff of the museum is also likely to have influenced this choice. Since the late 1850s Morris and Burne-Jones had become frequent habitues of exhibitions and galleries and keen members of a number of clubs and artistic circles through their friendship with Ruskin, Rossetti, and Madox Brown. They were particularly fond of visiting the South Kensington Museum, and Morris, Webb, and Burne-Jones in particular constantly studied the collections for inspiration and source material for their own work. This is evident from existing sketchbooks by Webb and Burne-Jones, and Morris's letters and lectures.(4) Furthermore, Morris, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti were already acquainted with members of the staff, in particular John Hungerford Pollen,(5) who was appointed assistant keeper in the museum and official editor of its science and art department in December 1863. This frequent association, further highlighted through incidences of common interests such as the acquisition of work by George Wardle (1836-1910),(6) for instance, shows that contact between the institution and members of the firm had already reached a level of mutual benefit by the mid-1860s.

Existing documents from the department of science and art and board of education that relate to the museum(7) show that late in 1865 Cole, Fowke, and Richard Redgrave (1804-1888), an artist, designer, and the first keeper of paintings at the museum, approached Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, asking them to prepare designs and estimates for the decoration of the west refreshment room. A budget of one hundred pounds was allowed for preliminary drawings.(8) The drawings must have been presented and passed by the museum authorities, for the commission was publicly announced in the Art Journal for April 1866.(9)